Lee Krasner in her New York studio – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 30th May – 1st September 2019

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view at the Barbican Art Gallery
30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

The augur of passion, the fire of movement, the colour of the embrace!

She used to ask herself, “does it work?”, as every artist should… not seeking affirmation from others but just being focused in her own mind on what she wanted to say, on that inner experience.

She was the equal of men, surpassing most. Krasner is finally getting the accolades she so richly deserves.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Barbican Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The black and white photographs have been digitally cleaned by myself.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view at the Barbican Art Gallery
30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Untitled
1946
Collection of Bobbi and Walter Zifkin
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Photo: Jonathan Urban

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Abstract No. 2
1947
IVAM Centre, Spain
Courtesy IVAM
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Mosaic Table
1947
Private Collection
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York

The cold winter on Long Island, where Krasner and Pollock were now living, forced her to work downstairs by the stove, where she made two brilliantly coloured mosaic tables using wagon wheels she found in the barn.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Composition 1949 and Stop and Go c. 1949
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Installation view with Stop and Go c. 1949
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Blue Level
1955
Private Collection
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Photo: Diego Flores

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Desert Moon
1955
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
© 2018 Digital Image Museum Associates/ LACMA/Art Resource NY/ Scala, Florence

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Bald Eagle
1955
Collection of Audrey Irmas, Los Angeles
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Photo: Jonathan Urban

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Bird Talk 1955 and Bald Eagle 1955
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Bird Talk 1955
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Prophecy
1956
Private Collection
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York
Photo: Christopher Stach

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Embrace
1956
Photograph © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Photo: Christopher Stach

After Pollock’s funeral, Krasner almost immediately began work on a series of violently erotic landscapes in shades of grey, black and pink. ‘Painting is not separate from life,’ she said, when asked how she had managed to paint in the midst of grief. ‘It is one. It is like asking – do I want to live? My answer is yes – and I paint.’

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Embrace 1956
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

“I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point.”

“Painting is a revelation, an act of love… as a painter I can’t experience it any other way.”

“I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent…”

“Aesthetically I am very much Lee Krasner. I am undergoing emotional, psychological, and artistic changes but I hold Lee Krasner right through.”

“Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking – do I want to live? My answer is yes – and I paint.”

“I couldn’t run out and do a one-woman job on the sexist aspects of the art world, continue my painting, and stay in the role I was in as Mrs Pollock… What I considered important was that I was able to work and other things would have to take their turn.”

“Jackson always treated me as an artist… he always acknowledged, was aware of what I was doing… I was a painter before I knew him, and he knew that, and when we were together, I couldn’t have stayed with him one day if he didn’t treat me as a painter.”

“[The Surrealists] treated their women like French poodles, and it sort of rubbed off on the Abstract Expressionists. The exceptions were Bradley Walker Tomlin, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. That might be the end of my listing. The other big boys just didn’t treat me at all. I wasn’t there for them as an artist.”

“I go on the assumption that the artist is a highly sensitive, intellectual and aware human being… It’s a total experience which has to do with the sensitivity of being a painter. The painter’s form of expressing [them]self is through painting.”

Lee Krasner

“… their blossoming was remarkable. In fact “blossoming” is hardly the word, for it suggests a soft, floral, ethereal event, adjectives one would not pick for the tough paintings, often full of barely controlled anger, that she was to produce after 1960… Is there a less “feminine” woman artist of her generation? Probably not.”

Robert Hughes

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with The Eye is the First Circle 1960
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Polar Stampede
1960
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York

Polar Stampede 1960, one of a series of paintings she made at night during bouts of insomnia and which her friend, the poet Richard Howard, called her ‘Night Journeys’

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
The Guardian
1960
Oil and house paint on canvas
53 1/8 × 58 1/8 in. (134.9 × 147.6cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art
Purchase, with funds from the Uris Brothers Foundation, Inc.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Assault on the Solar Plexus 1961
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Through Blue
1963
Private Collection, New York City
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Photo: Christopher Stach

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Through Blue 1963
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Another Storm 1963
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Another Storm
1963
Private Collection
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Icarus
1964
Thomson Family Collection, New York
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York
Photo: Diego Flores

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Chrysalis 1964 and Icarus 1964
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Combat 1965
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Siren
1966
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Photo: Cathy Carver, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Untitled
1969
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York City
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Portrait in Green 1969
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner, who died in 1984, at work in her studio in the 60s, painting Portrait in Green
Photo: Mark Patiky

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Palingenesis 1971
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Palingenesis
1971
Collection Pollock-Krasner Foundation
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York

Palingenesis noun Biology: the exact reproduction of ancestral characteristics in ontogenesis (the development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioural feature from the earliest stage to maturity).

When Krasner showed 12 new paintings at the Marlborough Gallery in New York the critic Robert Hughes described this pink as rapping ‘hotly on the eyeball at 50 paces’.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour
Installation view with Olympic 1974
Barbican Art Gallery 30 May – 1 September 2019
© Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Imperative
1976
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C

Barbican Art Gallery is pleased to stage the first retrospective in Europe for over 50 years of American artist Lee Krasner (1908-1984). One of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, Krasner made work reflecting the feeling of possibility and experiment in New York in the post-war period. Lee Krasner: Living Colour features nearly 100 works – many on show in the UK for the first time – from across her 50-year career, and tells the story of a formidable artist whose importance has often been eclipsed by her marriage to Jackson Pollock.

The exhibition celebrates Krasner’s spirit for invention – including striking early self-portraits; a body of energetic charcoal life drawings; original photographs of her proposed department store window displays, designed during the war effort; and her acclaimed ‘Little Image’ paintings from the 1940s with their tightly controlled geometries. It also features collages comprised of torn-up earlier work and a selection of her most impressive large-scale abstract paintings. This work is accompanied by rare photography and film from the period, in an elegant exhibition design by David Chipperfield Architects.

Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: ‘We are thrilled to be staging Lee Krasner: Living Colour. Despite featuring in museum collections around the world and being one of the few women to have had a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1984, Krasner has not received the recognition that she deserves in Europe, making this an exciting opportunity for visitors here to experience the sheer impact of her work’.

Krasner was determined to find new ways to capture inner experience. As the playwright Edward Albee commented at her memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in both her life and her work, ‘… she looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch’. Born in Brooklyn in 1908 in a family recently emigrated from Russia, she chose to attend Washington Irving High School (which at the time was the only school in New York to offer an art course for girls) before going on to study at the National Academy of Design. She was inspired by the opening of MoMA in 1929; joined the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where she made lifelong friends including renowned designer Ray Eames; was a member of the American Abstract Artists; and became a friend to many leading artists of the day including Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

In 1945, Krasner married Jackson Pollock and they moved to Springs, Long Island, borrowing $2000 from collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim to buy a run-down clapboard farmhouse. Krasner worked in the living room and then an upstairs bedroom – intimate make-shift studio spaces, which are mirrored in the Barbican Art Gallery’s upstairs rooms – while Pollock worked in a converted barn outside. After Pollock’s early death in a car crash in 1956, Krasner made the courageous decision to claim his studio as her own, which allowed her to work for the first time on large, un-stretched canvas tacked to the wall. The result would be the remarkable ‘Umber’ and ‘Primary’ series paintings, in which her exploration of scale, biomorphic form and colour collided into some of her most celebrated work. Examples on show include The Guardian, 1960; Happy Lady, 1963; Icarus, 1964; and Siren, 1966.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour draws from more than 50 international collections: from museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as from a large number of private collections. Many works are being exhibited in Europe for the first time, such as the monumental Combat (1965), which is over 4 metres long, and has travelled from the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia.

The exhibition is curated and organised by Barbican Centre, London, in collaboration with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Press release from the Barbican Art Gallery website [Online] Cited 14 June 2019

Unknown Photographer
Lee Krasner and her younger sister, Ruth
c. 1915-1916

“I was brought up to be independent. I made no economic demands on my parents so in turn they let me be… I was not pressured by them, I was free to study art. It was the best thing that could have happened.” ~ Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner (American, 1908-1984)
Self-Portrait
c. 1928
The Jewish Museum, New York
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation
Courtesy the Jewish Museum, New York

Unknown photographer
Lee Krasner
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print

Maurice Berezov (American, 1902-1989)
Lee Krasner in her New York studio
1939
Gelatin silver print
© Copyright A.E. Artworks, LLC

Fred Prater
Lee Krasner at the WPA Pier, New York City, where she was working on a WPA commission
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Lee Krasner Papers, c. 1905-1984
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Lee Krasner photo booth images
1940s-1950s?

With Jackson Pollock in Springs, London Island, 1949
Photo: Wilfred Zogbaum

“She would ask me to the studio. One didn’t just go there. One waited for an invitation. But she didn’t talk about her painting. The most distinct thing for her was the question: does it work? That was the big way that she thought. She wasn’t insecure about it. She wasn’t asking my opinion. She was asking herself.

“She had a very strong conviction about herself as a painter. She saw her own worth. She saw herself as equal to the men. She didn’t have the attention Pollock had, but she’d grown inured to that. Lee knew all about brands: she was Mrs Pollock, and sometimes she took advantage of it. But she also had great feeling for him as a painter. He wasn’t an easy person, but she never disparaged him, and he never disparaged her, either. The most powerful attraction between them was their intellectual acknowledgement of each other.”

Krasner’s nephew Jason McCoy quoted in Rachel Cooke. “Reframing Lee Krasner, the artist formerly known as Mrs Pollock,” on The Guardian website Sunday 12 May 2019 [Online] Cited 22 June 2019

Halley Erskine
Lee Krasner standing on a ladder in front of ‘The Gate’ (1959) before it was completed, Springs, July or August 1959
1959
Gelatin silver print

Hans Namuth (German, 1915-1990)
Lee Krasner in her studio in the barn, Springs
1962
Gelatin silver print
Lee Krasner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.